Atjeh en de Atjehers — Atjeh and the Atjehers — is an eye-witness account of the Netherlands-Indies blockade of the north-east coast of Sumatra during the early years of the Atjeh-oorlog, by J. A. Kruyt, published at Leiden in 1877 under the full subtitle ‘twee jaren blokkade op Sumatra’s Noordoost-kust’ — two years of blockade on Sumatra’s north-east coast. Kruyt served aboard the man-of-war Timor from 1873 to 1875 and was present at the Netherlands government’s first contacts with the princes of the eastern coast.
Contents
Kruyt’s book records his observations of the pepper trade, the negotiations with the oeléebalangs of Perlak, Idi, Peudawa and Lho Seumawe, the discovery of the petroleum spring at Rantau Pandjang in May 1875, and the prices of pepper at Penang in August 1873 (200–250 pillar-dollars the kojang, against 90 three years earlier). He gives the first European description of the seuneubò, the collection of pepper-gardens under a head gardener, and reports that the east coast annually exported 5–6 thousand kojang of pepper — a figure which, set against the 1913 export of ‘ruim 3 millioen kilogram’, is the basis of Broersma’s judgement that Atjeh’s pepper-trade had by 1913 fallen to less than a tenth of its 1873 volume. Kruyt also records the Dutch gifts to friendly chiefs — a silver coffee-service to the vorst van Edi, a golden watch to another chief, a silver rice-dish to a third — a practice which Broersma, fifty years later, still finds illustrated by the heirlooms of Teungkoe habib Moehamat bin Sajet Oesoeih at Peudawa.
Use by Broersma
Broersma cites Kruyt repeatedly in the early chapters of Verkenningen in Atjeh — for the 1874 encounter with the Gajos at Perlak, where the Gajos were said to be man-eaters and their women ‘eerst schoon’; for the spelling Sekoetji of Blang Sekotji; and for the activities of Teungkoe Tjhi Perlak, the old oeléebalang of Perlak, whose son ‘het jong van Peusangan’ had returned from his wanderings in Malakka to stand beside his father as a military commander in 1873–1874.
Significance
Kruyt’s book is the principal contemporary narrative of the blockade period of the Atjeh-oorlog, and the only detailed European source for the east-coast pepper economy immediately before its late-nineteenth-century collapse. Its mixture of naval memoir, commercial report and ethnographic note became a model for later colonial reconnaissance literature.
See Also
- J. A. Kruyt
- Verkenningen in Atjeh (1923)
- Pepper cultivation in Atjeh
- Teukoe Tjhi Perlak
- Teungkoe habib Moehamat bin Sajet Oesoeih
- Petroleum-bronnen van Perlak
- Rantau Pandjang
- Peureula (Perlak)
- Idi
- 1873
- 1875
- 1877
Source
Atjeh en de Atjehers, twee jaren blokkade op Sumatra’s Noordoost-kust, by J. A. Kruyt (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1877). Cited in Verkenningen in Atjeh by Dr. R. Broersma, pp. 30, 37, 40, 43, 50, 62, 81.